A Border Patrol agent keeps watch in Roma, Texas, across from Mexico. There has been a surge in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border.

Photo: Jay Janner, Associated Press

A Border Patrol agent keeps watch in Roma, Texas, across from...

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President Barack Obama speaks at a town hall during the Summit of the Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, Monday, July 28, 2014, in Washington. The President announced that the program will be renamed in honor of former South African President Nelson Mandela. The summit is the lead-up event to next week's inaugural U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, the largest gathering any U.S. President has held with African heads of state. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Even as they grapple with an immigration crisis at the border, White House officials are making plans to act before November's mid-term elections to grant work permits to potentially millions of immigrants who are in this country illegally, allowing them to stay in the United States without threat of deportation, according to advocates and lawmakers in touch with the administration.

Such a large-scale move on immigration could scramble election-year politics and lead some conservative Republicans to push for impeachment proceedings against President Obama, a prospect White House officials have openly discussed.

Yet there's little sign that the urgent humanitarian situation in South Texas, where unaccompanied minors have been showing up by the tens of thousands from Central America, has impeded Obama from making plans to address some portion of the 11.5 million immigrants now in this country illegally. Obama announced late last month that congressional efforts to remake the nation's dysfunctional immigration system were dead and he would proceed on his own authority to fix the system where he could.

Since then he's asked Congress for $3.7 billion to deal with the crisis of unaccompanied youths, a request that's gone unmet even as the House and the Senate scramble to see if they can vote on some solution to the crisis this week before adjourning for their annual August recess.

Advocates and lawmakers who were in separate meetings Friday said that administration officials are weighing a range of options including reforms to the deportation system and ways to grant relief from deportation to targeted populations in the country, likely by expanding Obama's two-year-old directive that granted work permits to certain immigrants brought here illegally as youths. That program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, has been extended to more than 500,000 immigrants so far.

Another focus could be the potentially hundreds of thousands of people who might be eligible for green cards today if current law didn't require them to leave the country for 10 years before applying for one.

For Obama, the political repercussions of broad executive action on immigration could be unpredictable, and extreme.

Republicans are warning he could provoke a constitutional crisis.

"It would be an affront to the people of this country, which they will never forgive, it would be a permanent stain on your presidency," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said on the Senate floor Monday, while urging language to block such executive action be made part of any legislation to address the border crisis.